As a common symbol throughout typographic history, the heart shape has found its way into many character sets and encodings, including those of

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

. Some characters depict the shape directly, others reference it in a more derived manner.

History

In the 1990s, NTT DoCoMo released a

pager A pager (also known as a beeper or bleeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknow ...

that was aimed at teenagers. The pager was the first of its kind to include the option to send a

pictogram A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and ...

as part of the text. The pager only had a single pictogram on its options, which was a heart-shaped pictogram. This is thought to be

Shigetaka Kurita (born May 9, 1972, Gifu Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese interface designer and often cited for his early work with emoji sets. Many refer to him as the creator of the emoji, a claim clarified in recent years. He was part of the team that cr ...

's first exposure to the use of digital symbols in text form. The pager received rave reviews in

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an are ...

which led to other companies in the region to consider using pictograms in the list of text characters. NTT DoCoMo then released another pager aimed at businesspeople, but this time dropped the heart

from the characters on the pager. Following its release, there was an outcry by users that the pictogram was no longer available, and many customers switched to other providers that had now included a heart pictogram in their markup. This led NTT DoCoMo to reverse their decision and include the heart pictogram. As the emoji became more popular, other heart colours were launched by

. Since then, each heart color has been given its own meaning. In early 2022,

Middle East The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (Europ ...

ern news publications suggested that sending a Red Heart emoji on

WhatsApp WhatsApp (also called WhatsApp Messenger) is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging (IM) and voice-over-IP (VoIP) service owned by American company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook). It allows use ...

Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the A ...

could amount to harassment and if convicted, the sender could serve a maximum sentence of two years in jail.

Notable characters

Red heart

The red heart (❤️) emoji is an

ideogram An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek "idea" and "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by famili ...

that is used in communication to express care and as a romantic or love gesture. It is frequently seen as the most popular emoji in surveys conducted by NTT DoCoMo.

Smiling face with heart-shaped eyes

The Heart Eyes (😍) emoji is to express happiness towards something. The

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the intentio ...

listed it as the third most used emoji in 2019, behind the Red Heart and Face with Tears of Joy emoji. It frequently appears in the top 10 lists for the most common emoji.

Encoding

A common

emoticon An emoticon (, , rarely , ), short for "emotion icon", also known simply as an emote, is a pictorial representation of a facial expression using characters—usually punctuation marks, numbers, and letters—to express a person's feelings, ...

for the heart is <3. In

several heart symbols are available in text format: In Code page 437, the original character set of the IBM PC, the value of 3 (hexadecimal 03) represents the heart symbol. This value is shared with the non-printing ETX control character, which overrides the glyph in many contexts.

List of heart related emojis

The single Unicode character heart related emojis can be found on the

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally fro ...

, Supplemental Symbols and Pictographs, and Symbols and Pictographs Extended-A ranges.

References

{{emoji navbox category:heart symbols